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Rh "Terror." After calling at the Cape of Good Hope, Kerguelen's Island, and Tasmania, the expedition arrived at the Auckland Islands on the 20th November, 1840, remaining until the 12th December. On the 13th December it reached Campbell Island, leaving again on the 17th for a cruise to the Antarctic Circle and the south polar regions. Although the Auckland Islands had been visited by D'Urville and Wilkes during the previous year, nothing had been published respecting the vegetation, and with characteristic ardour Hooker devoted himself to its exploration. The luxuriance of the flora and the relatively large proportion of plants with brilliant and conspicuous flowers at once attracted attention. Hooker goes so far as to say, when writing of Bulbinella Rossii, "Perhaps no group of islands on the surface of the globe, of the same limited extent and so perfectly isolated, can boast of three such beautiful plants, peculiar to their flora, as the Pleurophyllum speciosum, Celmisia vernicosa, and the subject of the foregoing description." Under such circumstances the scrutiny given to the vegetation was keen and almost exhaustive, as evidenced by the fact that but few additions have been made by later explorers. The first volume of the "Flora Antarctica," prepared by Hooker after his return to England, and issued in 1844, is confined to the flora of the Auckland and Campbell Islands. It contains descriptions of 100 species of flowering-plants and twenty ferns and fern-allies, together with numerous mosses, Hepaticæ, and other cryptogams, and is illustrated with eighty beautifully prepared plates, fifty-six of which are of phænogams. Altogether, it is a splendid monument of painstaking exploration and research, and it seems almost incredible that the observations and material on which it is founded should have been collected in less than a month.

After the discovery of Victoria Land in the summer of 1840–41 Sir James Ross returned to Tasmania, proceeding from thence to the Bay of Islands, which was reached on the 14th August, 1841. Here the expedition remained until the 23rd November. During this period Sir J. D. Hooker was actively engaged in collecting materials for his projected "Flora of New Zealand," receiving much assistance from Mr. Colenso and other residents. He remarks that his collections "contained no novelty amongst flowering-plants not known to Mr. Colenso and Dr. Sinclair, with whom I spent many happy days. Amongst cryptogamic plants I collected much that was then new, but most of the species have since been found elsewhere."

With the departure of the Antarctic Expedition in 1841 the first period of botanical discovery in New Zealand—that of investigation by visitors from abroad—may be said to have closed; for, although several scientific expeditions, such as the "Novara," "Challenger," &c., have since visited the colony, they have done little in the way of botanical research. Since 1841 the advance which has been made is almost wholly due to the efforts of the colonists themselves.